Non-post
The theme of More Excelsior, if you haven’t picked up on it yet, is trying to tease out why some things in life aren’t as good as they could be, and then proposing some ways to improve them.
Language, specifically the English one, happens to be an area sorely in need of some improvement. While I am perhaps best known for my quixotic battles against the execrable double-space-after-a-period (see here), I have found a new villain begging for some old fashioned frontier justice – “non-paper.”
I’m not sure the extent to which this so-called word has burrowed into the real world, so this could be a real “inside baseball” type of thing (Sidebar: isn’t “inside baseball” a very “inside baseball” phrase? Does that mean it’s an onomatopoeia? Update – actually, it’s called an autological word. Learn something new…). In the public sector circles in which I run, “non-paper” is now the preferred term for any memo, briefing paper, white paper, or basically any other document. From what I can puzzle out, it’s diplomatic jargon for an “officially unofficial” document, and was originally used to share some controversial proposal and give some cover to policymakers if such a document was leaked.
While I can appreciate the need for caution and subtlety, the linguistic absurdity of “non-paper” trumps whatever CYA usefulness the word has. I mean, seriously – writing “non-paper” on the top of a document comprising sentences, formed into paragraphs, including headings and pagination, and following a basically logical structure, then printed on 8.5×11 post-consumer waste recycled PAPER, is straight-up insane. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I’m in meetings and people say it with a straight face.
Of course it’s a paper. Maybe it’s a paper in draft form. Maybe it’s “for internal use only.” Maybe it’s – ugh – “pre-decisional.” But it is a paper, dang it.
And calling a paper a paper is just a little way to move ever upwards.
I had no idea this was going on. If possible, I’m even more disheartened than ever about our government’s ability to accurately use a dictionary, let alone a style guide, or, you know, get any real work done.
There’s no mystery behind the idea that if you keep creating names/explanations for things that obviously contradict their inherent being, you’re going to (a) look like an asshat and (b) lose your facility for intelligent thought and reason. And then you end up with big, fat, bureacratic, creaking messes. Such is the case with our health care system. If you’ve built a system betting on the fact that consumers won’t understand it, chances are, you’ll cease to understand it yourself. But I digress.
While I’ll say that we PR folk are often to blame for word fakery of this vein, I’m seeing it more and more often in the jargon of every type of industry – and it’s freaking me out. I fear someday soon I’ll have to begin stockpiling dictionaries and grammar books so that the children of the future might learn the secret, underground language once known as American English.
Veronica
October 23, 2009 at 10:40 pm